Could alternative method of combatting climate change unite right and left???

While the idea generally is good, the numbers are not on your side.

Water delivery is hugely energy intensive, much more so than people imagine. LA, for example, uses 1 billion kWh per year for its water supply. You almost need one nuclear reactor just to provide for this water supply.

In areas that naturally don't get water, energy cost would be much higher, from desalination, pumping, distributing, and resupplying water due to huge evaporation. If that energy would be supplied by alternative sources, maybe one can get ahead in the CO2 count, but if any of it comes from fossils, I's be surprised if the overall CO2 budget would be in a net positive way (CO2 reduced).

Desalination is another elephant in the room. Energy costs are about 10 kWh per kgal. Not, a kgal is not much more than 10 bathtubs of water, a drop in the bucket if you want to irrigate a substantial area at high evaporation levels.

In summary, I would assume that desert agriculture would be more suitable in situations where providing food is the ultimate goal, like in your Israel example, but not to combat climate change.

 

A phenomenal answer to my topic Quantum Nerd! Much appreciated.

I am no expert..... but two initiatives have given me the impression that the bulk of the energy needed to accomplish this....... might just come from solar?!


http://www.ssb-foundation.com/


Sahara Solar Breeder (SSB) Plan
directed toward global clean energy superhighway

 

Stop the clear cutting of the forest areas....

Trying to control Global Warming with emissions control while "Some 46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year—equivalent to 36 football fields every minute. is like treating a gaping chainsaw wound with a Flintstones Band-Aid and a tube of Unguentine. What it tells me is those with faux concern over emissions while ignoring the main cause of the problem are simply profiteers of the worst ilk. Their proposals will NEVER control warming without the cessation of 46-58 thousand square miles of deforestation every year, I'm sure they know that. However, if deforestation was stopped and the temp stops rising at it's 10ths of a degree every hundred years, the profiteering from their eco terrorism would end as well. As in nature Leeches always keep the host alive by not bleeding them too much. Should the time come where deforestation results in planting as many trees as they cut down, then I'll listen. Till such a time spare me the the sale pitch and fear mongering, without addressing the real problem ya'alls emission schemes are just a fancy con game where some get richer, most get poorer and the problem still persists.

 

The other initiative has been organized by Norway.

http://www.politicalforum.com/opini...saving-new-orleans-florida-rising-oceans.html

The Sahara Forest Project...and saving New Orleans and Florida from rising oceans!



Did you know that there is an Islamic prophecy that the Islamic desert regions would be turned green in the latter days?????

This topic is of special interest to me because I live about a hundred miles from the Bay of Fundy. I live five kms from the ocean on the eastern part of Nova Scotia. In my area the difference between low tide to high tide is about one meter! The land form of the Bay of Fundy has a funnelling effect on tidal waters and so parts of the Fundy have a difference of fifteen to seventeen meters between low to high tide!

The question on my mind would be if ocean levels were to rise about thirty centimeters in my part of Nova Scotia, would they rise by four or five meters along parts of the Fundy????

There are 143,000 acres of farmland taken back from the Fundy by dikes that are probably in the position of the proverbial canary in a coal mine in relation to rising ocean levels!

Every cubic meter of H2O added to the water table of nations in the Middle EAst will NOT be on top of New Orleans, Florida, Holland, Bangladesh or those 143,000 acres along the Fundy!!!!![/B]

I felt a huge sense of relief when I first heard about The Sahara Forest Project!


https://www.facebook.com/SaharaForestProject
Sahara Forest Project

http://www.angelfire.com/moon2/koran/index.blog?topic_id=1021110

 

I totally agree with you that stopping deforestation should be the number one priority......… and other plans should be considered to be secondary to that ....... but...........getting people to realize how much danger we could be in if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to begin to crack and slide at an increased rate...… may be one of the only ways to get people to realize how dependent we are on trees.

 

The best way would be to stop going into national debt. All of that borrowed money is used for things that inevitably result in carbon dioxide emissions. Get rid of government regulations which force manufacturers to either go out of business, or shift manufacturing to developing countries that don't care at all about pollution.

The left is happy because they get their clean air, and the right is happy because they get their fiscally sound economy.

 

Strangely enough.........… I do think that this idea has potential.

I am convinced that there needs to be a second level to the North American economy........ and I agree that it should NOT be based on debt!

http://www.politicalforum.com/econo...-north-american-economy-could-organizing.html

Volunteerism is over twenty percent of North American economy… could organizing it...



back up…… stabilize…. insure… the value of the USA dollar?

Ithaca, New York has one of the simplest and easily understood measuring instruments for economic activity imaginable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours

Is it theoretically possible for a group of people to accomplish a much greater organization of volunteerism through a database that would give North America a secondary economy that we could fall back on….. just in case?

 

I'm all for volunteerism, but it will never happen. The reason climate change is being pushed by politicians is because it is a politician's dream. They get another form of taxation, more power, and some apocalyptic nightmare of a boogeyman just in case somebody questions he need for them getting more power and money to spend.

The real fact is that anthropogenic climate change has been debunked for years now. The scientific community knows it, the politicians know it, and the only people that don't are the newbs that buy into that nonsense. There can be only one reason politicians are still pushing it, and that reason is, as always, power.

 

Had we bought into it back in 1997, we'd never stop paying the scam ransome.

 

Here's your 97% consensus completely debunked, with sources listed.

[video=youtube;yTTaXqVEGkU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTTaXqVEGkU[/video]

 

I think the plants should be run by the government though, I would not want corporations in control of them

 

The only problem is, again, the energy scale. Just to compare energy needed for LA's water supply again: It would take about this to power it with solar:

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/07/127-mw-solar-power-plant-opened-in-arizona/

Cost: $550 million and a land use of 1100 acres. And that doesn't even include cost for energy storage, in case you want to pump water at night as well.

And that's for the average of almost 600 liters of water use per capita per day, which most of us use unconsciously without even recognizing how valuable and energy intensive that water use is. Of course, like with anything wasteful, the US is tops in water use per capita in the world, too.

 

I'd agree with that.

However, this is regulation that would not hurt the US, but rather economically less advantaged regions of the world. Cutting forest in the Amazon, for example, is for the loggers often the only way to economically survive.

In Greece, deforestation was significantly increased after the financial crisis, because people didn't have money for heat, so they started cutting down trees for fire wood.

Like with foreign conflict, our conservative friends seem to be perfectly fine to restrict other country's inhabitant's freedom, as long as it doesn't affect their own freedom to pollute and be wasteful with energy at will.

 

This probably largely explains why when you view Haiti and The Dominican Republic from the air………… The Dominican Republic is largely forest whereas the jungles of Haiti have almost all been cut down.

This is especially noticeable because these two nations are on one island.

 

On the other hand………. some sort of spiritual transformation/ awakening/ zeitgeist seems to be taking place that has something to do with how Oprah and Dr. Raymond Moody and others have made NDE accounts into a part of our culture……..and it seems to me as if this awakening will increase the tendency to volunteer our time and decrease our tendency to fight so vehemently over smaller issues.

If ten or more percent of politicians and bureaucrats were to become five percent more spiritually inclined and five percent less motivated by greed……. the results could be astonishing!

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/reincarnation04.html#a09

 

Rain forests are huge producers of methane due to the poor soil and outgassing of decaying matter.

 

BAN the RAINFOREST!

 

Also, old growth forests take up less CO2 than new growth forests. One suggestion is that genetic engineering could produce plants that store more CO2 in their root system, then no till farming would help keep the stored CO2 in the ground.

Now, the real thing to be proven is whether higher CO2 is even a bad thing as it is being portrayed by the alarmists.

 

Get to the real cause of the problem or F-off on raising my cost of energy to make up for for those who won't comply on clear cutting forest. They are the problem, not us. Go after them NOT US!

 

In the last years I have changed impression of the "peaceful and green Canada".

First of all Canadians have been fighting like all other NATO members of ISAF in Afghanistan [and this is not that peaceful].

But overall, I have noted the exploitation of oil sands in your country: what's environmentalist in it? A part being a source of GHG [decreasing, industrial processes are improving], that usage of the arctic / sub-arctic soil is at least concerning, from an environmentalist perspective.

And this makes me wonder: which is the real soul of modern Canada today?

 

So, you want some poor person in the Amazon, who can barely feed their family, stop logging wood, as they do for a living, so that you can continue enjoying the luxury of driving the biggest polluting vehicle that you can afford? Just as I thought, and clearly in agreement with my above statement.

 

So, now rain forests are bad? According to our previous conversations, I thought plants would be just lapping up all that additional CO2 and save us from AGW?

Note that I agree with you that full grown forests have less capacity to absorb CO2 than immature ones. I also agree that decaying matter produces methane. However, I don't have enough information on my fingertips and not enough time to research right now whether the rain forest effect is net positive or negative for the green house problem. Intuition would tell me that, even a mature rain forest would absorb more green house gases than it produces, but maybe you have more info on that?

 

No more information than you have. I forget where I read about the methane production.

 

Speaking of methane; leftist environmental climate change fanatics are the wackos who want to put some sort of cork device collector up the rumps of methane emitting cows and bulls to protect the world from the terrible collective danger of cow farts . . . and I (alas) kid you not. They are also the wackos who believe that making wood burning stoves illegal to use inside the United States is going to significantly affect the world's climate. Sigh!

 

I don't think many realize that this AGW agenda is being pushed mainly by environmentalists and not scientists.